Drone racing lifts off, delivering ‘out of body’...

1of6Jonathan Gaiser of Sunnyvale holds his drone after a heat during the drag race contest at S.F.’s Palace of Fine Arts Theater.Photo: Scott Strazzante, The Chronicle

2of6Adaline Lang of North Hollywood and Reggie Ramos of Long Beach compete during Aerial Sports League’s drone drag race at the Palace of Fine Arts Theater in San Francisco.Photo: Scott Strazzante, The Chronicle

3of6San Francisco’s Aerial Sports League — one of the first groups in the country to organize drone competitions — turned the Palace of Fine Arts Theater into a looping, quarter-mile indoor drone drag race course.Photo: Scott Strazzante, The Chronicle

4of6Taylor Ellis of Fresno waits to place his drone at the starting line during Aerial Sports League’s drone drag race at the Palace of Fine Arts Theater in San Francisco.Photo: Scott Strazzante, The Chronicle

5of6Taylor Ellis of Fresno waits to compete during Aerial Sports League’s drone drag race at the Palace of Fine Arts Theater in San Francisco.Photo: Scott Strazzante, The Chronicle

6of6Ashton Gamble (center), 11, of Los Angeles checks out the event line up before competing in the Aerial Sports League’s drone drag race at the Palace of Fine Arts Theater in San Francisco.Photo: Scott Strazzante, The Chronicle

The first time Justin “JReyFPV” Baltazar piloted a racing drone, he had an “out-of-body” experience.

“It was just a huge adrenaline rush, like I’m actually flying, but I’m not flying, I’m still on the ground,” the Santa Clara resident said last week as he competed for the title of California’s fastest drone pilot. “It was crazy.”

Pilots like Baltazar wear goggles to view video from a drone-mounted camera. This tricks their minds into thinking they’re actually riding aboard a craft the size of a folded sheet of paper.

To date, drones are best known for aerial photography and more speculative pursuits like package delivery. But now racing them has caught on, and some say the high-speed, relatively low-cost competition could be the next big tech-driven sport. In just two years, the sport has evolved from grassroots meet-ups of hobbyists gathering in parks, forests, warehouses or breweries to formal, sanctioned races and a TV series broadcast on ESPN. In September, the Reno Air Races — a showcase for regular aircraft for the last half-century — will for the first time include national championship races for drones.

Last Thursday, San Francisco’s Aerial Sports League — one of the first groups in the country to organize drone competitions — turned the Palace of Fine Arts Theater into a looping, quarter-mile indoor drone drag race course, filled with the loud whiney buzz of drones speeding more than 100 mph. The event drew 16 pilots from throughout California, from ages 11 to 45.

Although the invitation-only event was not televised live, NBC Sports Bay Area plans to produce a half-hour highlight show and drone racing documentary to debut on the local sports channel on Aug. 1.

“I think it will become a big spectator sport,” said Baltazar, 28, who’s also part of a group of drone owners who practice almost every weeknight in Sunnyvale’s Baylands Park. “This is going to be the next version of NASCAR.”

The drone racing industry has a long way to go before it becomes as popular as auto races or other traditional sports. But it is the latest in a new generation of technology-fueled electronic sports, or e-sports, that is attracting attention from major corporate sponsors and media companies. The burgeoning popularity of professional video game tournaments has helped drone racing catch on.

ESPN’s Drone Racing League series, now in a second season, has given the sport a major stage. Last month, the league, a New York startup, completed a $20 million round of financing that included Liberty Media, which owns Formula 1 racing, and British satellite TV company Sky. (Another investor is Hearst Ventures, a division of Hearst, the owner of The Chronicle.)

A group watches as 16 contestants compete in San Francisco’s Aerial Sports League’s drone drag race in the Palace of Fine Arts Theater.

Network executives are eager to find new forms of sports entertainment programming. And drone racing is so new that it’s still inexpensive to produce, said Adam Jones, who leads the sports and entertainment industry section of the consulting firm PwC.

“The type of investment that we’re seeing made in drone racing properties signals there is that potential” to become a mainstream sport, Jones said.

Although a British teen won $250,000 for winning a world drone tournament in Dubai last year, drone pilots — who use aviator call signs like airplane pilots — interviewed at the San Francisco race said they weren’t making enough to quit their day jobs.

San Francisco resident Colby “SFPV” Curtola, 28, who works for drone mapping company Skycatch, won the event, but he noted the $5,000 top prize wasn’t huge. “My girlfriend hates me because I fly drones all day,” he joked. “So I’m going to buy her something nice with the prize money. And that will pay rent for a month.”

The Aerial Sports League started in 2012 to build a community of drone pilots but soon moved into manufacturing durable racing drone frames. It’s now pivoted to organizing events, such as the drone drag race.

Adaline Lang of North Hollywood places her drone at the starting line during the Aerial Sports League’s drone drag race at the Palace of Fine Arts Theater in San Francisco.

Photo: Scott Strazzante, The Chronicle

It has competitors like MultiGP, a Florida company founded in 2015 that has helped organize 2,500 regional races so far this year. San Francisco’s 415FPV is among its local chapters; its approximately 175 members fly in different parks and inside the Barebottle Brewery in San Francisco.

“We typically set up a few gates, but we also love to use anything we can find as an obstacle,” said chapter organizer Alex “Banq” Bancalari, 25. “We used a forklift as our start/finish line one time.”

Pilot Tony “Tony T” Thompson, 30, of Huntington Beach (Orange County) flew to Dubai last year to compete in the World Drone Prix, won by the British teen who took home the $250,000 grand prize. Thompson, who works as a cinema drone pilot, hopes there will be more big-prize events on the horizon.

“It’s on TV; that’s a big deal,” he said. “We were just in backyards and in parks a year ago.”

Drone racers pull goggles over their eyes to view video beamed directly from their craft, which are cheaper, smaller and lighter than the more well-known commercial and hobbyist quad copters. Racers are built for speed — a Drone Racing League craft set a new world record earlier this month at 163.5 mph.

The pilots said they can build their own drones for about $500, roughly the cost of a video game system, and parts like rotors are cheap enough to replace when they break, which is often because the aircraft fly into walls, gates and each other. And at speeds of 80 mph or more, flying takes a lot of practice and lightning-quick reflexes.

But drone racers become addicted because the first-person point of view gives them the illusion of flying, triggering a “cascade” of natural body chemicals like adrenaline and dopamine, said Aerial Sports League CEO Marque Cornblatt.

Justin Baltazar of Santa Clara places his drone at the starting line for the drag race at the Palace of Fine Arts Theater in San Francisco. “This is going to be the next version of NASCAR,” said Baltazar, 28.

Photo: Scott Strazzante, The Chronicle

“It’s like jumping out of an airplane or riding a motorcycle,” he said.

When he was younger, 11-year-old Ashton “Drobot Racer” Gamble of Los Angeles wanted to race cars. But a year ago, he and his father discovered drone racing. He’s since competed in events in Florida and Delaware.

“It’s like you’re inside the drone, so you can go from zero to 80 (mph) in a second and that’s a really cool thing,” said Ashton, who made Thursday’s semifinal round.

Dan Gettinger, co-director of the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College in New York, said one barrier to the sport gaining bigger audiences is that racing drones are too small and too fast for people sitting in stands to track.

“It’s cool to see them zipping around, but impossible to figure out who was who,” he said.

Cornblatt said his company hopes to diversify drone sports with more than just races. The Aerial Sports League is working on a sort of airborne roller derby in which fast drones aim to score points while others block their competitors.

Cory “MewoFPV” Ibanez, 24, a UC Santa Cruz computer engineering graduate student, believes the next step will be larger racing drones that fans sitting in a larger arena or stadium can see and hear.

That, he said, would appeal to fans who like “loud, aggressive race cars.”